Gaming Roundup: The Ugly Truths of Gaming

So what has everybody been buzzing about in the gaming world for the past few weeks? Naughty Dog’s new post-apocalyptic title? Planetside 2? 38 Studios’ collapse? Some rising indie developers?

Nope.

Story after story has been making the rounds online about men treating female gamers, professional or casual, like so much dirt. Shocking, we know. The gaming community is filled with misogynist assholes? News at 11. Take your pick of stories.

How about E3 itself, still crawling with booth babes, which most people agree cheapens the trade show aspect of the event? But don’t be female and criticize the booth babes or have a Kickstarter for a project exploring bad female tropes in gaming, or you’ll suffer online ire no male blogger has to deal with. Like threats of rape. Hey, maybe it’ll build character for those uppity, overly sensitive female gamers, like it’s supposed to do for Lara Croft. They should feel so bad for trying to, you know, ruin other players’ good times and trying to bring everyone down to their level of asking for some basic human respect.

How about the public humiliation of Miranda Pakozdi, a player in Capcom’s Cross Assault competition for Street Fighter and Tekken players, who was subjected to lewd comments from her coach and having her breasts and thighs filmed? Hey, it’s just trash talk, right? If you can’t deal with it, you’re just proving that women should be in the kitchen making sandwiches.

We’d like to do more reporting on games this week — there are some tidbits on Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, Game of Thrones, and Final Fantasy VII below — but this is what’s really getting us fired up. And not in a good way.

Earlier this week, word leaked that Linux users using third-party software (in this case, WINE) to run Windows-based applications on their OS were being banned from Diablo 3 for cheating, simply for using the WINE workaround. Blizzard now refutes this report, stating that test cases did not result in any false positive results, and only cheaters are being banned.

Assholes like this make me ashamed to be a gamer, a geek, and a man. They need to be corralled into one dark corner of the internet where nobody else can see them, and they can just take a giant shit in it.

"With all of this hostility and prejudice from fans and professional
peers, is it any wonder only 10% of game programmers are female and they make on average $3K less than their male counterpoints?"

That's not really pertinent data without also including the male to female ratio and payrates of software developers in general. I would not be surprised if those rates were similar throughout all fields of programming, not just games.

My daughters are both avid gamers (as are both my sons.) Anybody dissing the XX-chromosome crew loses my custom pretty much forever. I want to support, with my shopping dollar, a world where my daughters are treated with the same respect and given the same opportunities as my sons are.

They play the same games, and they regularly school each other regardless of gender. The only person they don't school anymore is ME, and that's because I'm too proud to continue trying to play against them.

Somehow this article just reminds me of the high number of socially "awkward" people I know that are gamers.
With a much higher percentage being men who just don' t know how to talk to people, and have a really hard time talking to a pretty woman.

The harrasser is her team's coach, too. Nice. Totally looks exactly how you'd picture him to look. Maybe minus Cheetos stains down his shirt. The expression on her face is pretty much identical to the one I was making as I was reading through all of this stuff.

On the plus side (?) at least people are noticing & talking about how awful it is. I mean, this isn't anything new, but I think you can see the tides shifting. Then again, I'm an optimist. The first, however, is far from over.

This is why i refuse to identify as a gamer. I'll happily 'fess up to playing games for enjoyment just as I'll say I read for enjoyment, etc. But I have no desire to be identified with a) the assholes who can't deal with women or b) the fat slobs who never learned the basics of personal grooming. While the reality is far more diverse, male gamers all too often are presented as the guy in the picture above. Why on earth would I want to be percieved as someone like him - a grossly overweight, unkempt jerk who harrasses women?

I would like for more women to throw it back in their harassers' faces. If someone is being a jerk, call them out. There's no reason to lay down and take it. I and most of gamers I know would stand behind any woman sticking up for herself.

Standing up for yourself doesn't mean you're a bitch, uppity or whatever people want to label you. If you stand up for yourself you're saving the next woman down the line from having to put up with the same crap. Eventually if enough women stand up for themselves, behaviours will change for the better.

I never realized just how much of a pig myself and most of the gamming community was until I found Tor.com and started reading some of the article's here. It made me really take a look at myself and how I percieve Woman in general. I never thought I was a fullfledged mysoginist, I was always the "white Knight" type. But the people around here did open my eyes to how much of a jerk guys who take that stance are. So kudos to you Tor.com, I wont say I am fixed but you did open my eyes to a problem.

I used to be a video game tester for EA in Orlando at the Tiburon studio. I worked there for about 2 years, in that time I think at most there were all of 6 Women working at the QA building at one time. There were about 80 people permenatly there year round and 400 more durring the spring and summer for Madden and NCAA. It was not until I really started looking at myself and the world at large that I realized how much of a pain in the a** we were to them. Some of us were overly protective and other were just down right hostile. None of us could doubt there skills on the sticks, because for the most part they were seriously good. But at the same time when one woman moved over into the Online group they had to not only give us a spiel about containing our guyness. But this perfectly qualified gamer (who always beat my bug count BTW and I was one of the best **toots horn**) also had to be given a spiel about giving us some leeway for our shenanigans. I dont like to think we made the situation hostile but it must have been uncomfortable at best. Seriously those women were the most tolerant people in the world because that was one wild male dominated work place we had going there, although a lot of fun too. But it is amazing to me how easy it is for guys to turn their blinders on to how they treat woman, we all definetly had our blinders on. For many like myself I think (hope) that men do not realize how horrible we as a whole treat women. We just need to have our eyes opened and not be afraid to look at our selves in the mirror and do some introspection.

So...the video game geek group cleans it up, and in five years we see a blog post saying "Why do men consistently talk tons of trash to other male video game players but don't ever talk trash to female players? It's sexism! Whaaaaaaaa!"

Hey, I'm a man and I generally dislike first person shooters and realtime strategy. I don't see why gender means you like or are good at a certain type of game. I'm games of choice are turn based strategy and single player RPGs. Or mech/fighter based combat simulators.

@13: Actually, the negative stereotypes of gamers are exactly the reason why you should identify as a gamer.

Yes, gamers are looked down on in mainstream culture. Yes, there are horrible people who are gamers– misogynists, trolls, assholes, and nearly every other kind of sick, twisted bastard that you can find in the world.

However, there are good people, too. And the fact that the image that most people have of a "gamer" is of the fat dick is because, too often, the fat dicks are the most vocal parts of gaming culture.

But always keep in mind that oftentimes, whether online or off, the loudest people aren't the majority. And believe me– as a loud person, I should know.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better than this. We will do better than this. And unless everyone who plays video games bands together and shows how diverse, how creative, and how welcoming (yes, I know it sounds strange, but believe me, most gamers are truly welcoming) our culture is, it's not going to get better.

Don't worry about others' negative perceptions of you. Work to change peoples' perceptions. And the best way to do that is to be the best person you can be.

@19 No one will be saying that. I pretty much didn't even want to write about this topic again this week because it seems almost futile to hope that things will change. But things will really never change if people don't talk about it.

And guys trash talk other guys, too. No one's saying they don't. And the homophobic content of much of that said trash talk is an entirely different post. This isn't even about just trash talking in online matches. That's only one part of an overarching problem.

@theresa_delucci I can't speak rationally about Miranda w/out comprimising my entire point. I mean she WAS genetically engineered to be perfect...why wouldn't that include DAT ASS!? She's still annoying...

@TorChris I mean Jesus, girl, do something other than just duck when infected zombie people rush you. That's basic zombie survival instinct 101

I'll make a deal.
I will go back to identifying myself as a gamer when developers stop encouraging this type of behaviour. I remember enjoying games with female friends and NOT being embarrassed by the needless and detracting "fan service"-BECAUSE IT WASN'T THERE.

When I don't have to actively avoid purchasing half-naked crap, and can go back to finding non-embarrassing games in the genres I enjoy I'll work on improving the "gamer" image. Until then, I shall avoid the gamer label, as I am clearly not the target demographic-sexist homophobe.

I have seen far too much of the kind of behavior described in the article above. And it doesn't limit itself to sexism. It is sad to see that, rather than learning to be more tolerant themselves, so many folks that don't fit into society at large form their own little cliques so they can look down on someone else.
And it is not just women who get treated with disdain by geeks who think they know everything. I have seen professional military men told that they didn't know what they were talking about by geeks who learned everything they knew from reading books, and playing with toy soldiers and video games.
The old catchphrase of referring to folks who are not SF fans as "mundanes" is another example of the fan community looking down their noses at people.

I'd also say that the media, especially the media that covers games and related stuff, need to watch out how they show both male and female gamers. I'm not talking about the photo above which is documentary in nature, but in general I see a lot of images that only show female gamers who are cute/pretty/hot while the male gamers are shown as overweight and poorly groomed... the typical "Yeah, he's never been laid" guy. The truth is, of course, that people who game look like the rest of the population more or less.... but by showing female gamers as attractive and male gamers as poorly groomed geeks it subtly reinforces some perceptions.

Okay, female game player here (I don't call myself a gamer because I don't consider myself to be one - I have a life outside gaming and that always comes first) and FF7 fan. That trailer is basically a compilation of various FMV moments from the original Playstation game, and it makes me suspect what they're going to be doing is basically just clearing up the original game code to the point where it can be compiled into a windows executable and run on a PC. I doubt they're going to redo the main graphics (which are very blocky and low-polygon) - that would require basically redoing the whole thing from scratch, and if Squeenix were going to be doing such a thing, they'd be putting out a trailer with the Crisis Core/Advent Children level of graphic on it.

PS: "Cloud Saves" - in the context of the game, that is a *HORRIBLE* pun.

"I would like for more women to throw it back in their harassers' faces.
If someone is being a jerk, call them out. There's no reason to lay down
and take it. I and most of gamers I know would stand behind any woman sticking up for herself."

Would you like that? Would you really? Well, then...I will get right on that. /sarcasm

Do you know what I would like? I would like for people to stop telling my gender what we can do to keep assholes and criminals from disrespecting us and harming us. I would like there to be a law that says that no one is allowed to say complete bullshit like what you just said until they can prove that they have never refrained from speaking out when they are harassed or they see other people being treated this way.

I would like to smash such asisine comments until they fracture into a trillion pieces under their obvious lack of compassion for what it feels like to be in such situations, until such "advice" is pulverised to dust by the reality of how dangerous it can be to do "speak up" when one is outnumbered and being harassed, and then I would smite these same sentiments with their own sanctiminousness.

With even more special horrors waiting in store for bits like "I and most of gamers I know would stand behind any woman sticking up for herself." being written in the comments a post featuring a still from that vid and a link to it.

-I mean, wtf?!?!?! DID YOU FUCKING MISS THE PART WHERE NO ONE HAD HER BACK? and where the asshole that began the harrassment even at one point repeated that he had the other men's back?-

anyway. That's what I would like.

(also, a teleportor. because who doesn't want a teleporter?)

-edited to clarify that it is the words I would smite, not the person saying them. not that the latter wouldn't be tempting, I just was actually trying to focus my justified rage on the words being said rather than using my own words to direct violence at the person saying them.

-edited again bc I think my punctuation may be making parts of the comment appear and disappear.

I ran a game for about 15 years, and my group was by far the most mixed group of gamers that you may ever see. Since my wife, and even occasionally my daughter played, it was not too sexist, just a bunch of friends hanging out together having a good time. To my way of thinking, that is what gaming should be, have fun, play the characters and enhance your friendships.

I used to belong to a RPG group back in the 1980s - there were two women including me, and the rest were men. One week, as we were arriving, we were mistaken for members of the art group which was meeting at the same time, at which point, the lads all said "No, they're with us! They're gamers!"
How have things slid back into such nastiness? Or was I just very, very lucky?

One note regarding Final Fantasy VII: it's not being remade for PC per se, it's just being re-released (it was originally released for PC when it first came out) to be compatible with today's PCs, with a few minor additions.

I've never worried about what others think. My solution for Morons has always been to kill the mater frakkers or lead high level npc's to their location if it isn't PvP. Most of them are cry babies and greifers who hate to die.

@48 Leslie I started in the 80's too. My character was usually the only female in the party and even the NPC's were all male. Things have progressed quite a bit since then.

I am, and always will be, a geek. I'm a writer, a reader and a gamer. I'm also five feet and one inche tall and I weigh one hundred pounds.
Booth Babe, eh? Is that what they're calling us now?

To those who believe that I could spend my time more constructively than playing games, I ask you, "How exactly?"

My parents seems to be under the impression that I don't do any work around the house because I play too many games, perpetuating two very real gender/gamer stereotypes a) that gamers are filthy people with no sense of personal or environemental hygene, and b) that women are primarily homemakers. In an attempt to irradicate both, my living space is spotless and my gamer husband and I are equal homemakers.

My sister and her husband tend toward the notion that I need to be working in some mundane cubical farm, exercising what they deem to be my marginal creativity in the capacity of a paper pusher in order to gain financial stability--despite our current financial stability at a drastically lower income than theirs. What they don't seem to realize is that I have been fostering a lifestyle of creativity that has not now, nor has it ever, centered on material wealth or ownership in the short 27 years that I have been alive. In addition to the sterotype of the gamer slob is that of the broke gamer slob who lives with their parents. The image here is of a fat man playing games in his mother's basement. This stereotype will only be iradicated when men and women of material means and hygene speak up and become proud of their gamer status. We are relegated to the "freak" gamer classification because clean, employed people don't want to be associated with fat mysoginists in popular--and counter-culture--gaming communities.

Furthermore, I will be the first to say that I am sick and tired of being called "teh gay" because I prefer to play male characters. This is horrible, mysonginistic and hateful on so many levels. 1) Why does sexuality have to play into it at all? Why is it that a man who plays a female character, or a woman who plays a male character, automatically assumed to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. We are online and in your group to run BGs, not discuss the social implications of why my having a highly-geared male toon is gender-bending. 2) The fact that I am called "gay" means that the people who ultimately have a problem with role-player gender-bending are people who are also insulted by--or afraid of being referred to as--"gay". We can, therefore, add homophobia to the mysoginist equation. The people who prey on women in gaming also tend to be homophobic by nature. Don't get me wrong. I'm extremly classist, sexist and racist in WoW (in that I only play ranged dps, have all male characters, and none of them are human).

I don't see how my having a male character makes me a gender-bender, nor do I see how playing a male character in D&D is a threat to the men in my group. As role players, it is entirely our prerogative if we want to play a male or a female. That does not give male players the license to harrass our characters for no better reason than their character can't hook up with my character because they're the same sex (which, if they weren't homophobic to begin with, that wouldn't be a problem), which means if they didn't have a shot in Hell with one of us in RL, they certainly don't in-game either. All any player in a D&D group ever asked for is a little respect and dignity, the same courtesies being shown male players, especially by DMs. Don't tell me any of you casual people still reading this long treatise has never been in a group with a female that wasn't accused of being given special treatment because she has the unfortunate disability of being female. This is especially hurtful when my own husband accusses me of being a gender-bender because he can't be married to a man. Nevermind the fact that role-playing is exactly that: pretend. My character is male. My husband's character is male. We are married in real life. In-game, we are not. In RL, we talk philosophy over a plate of meat and cheese while sitting in the bath tub. In-game, we assasinate other teammates for money. Two very different worlds that should not be mistaken for the same one.

"To my way of thinking, that is what gaming should be, have fun, play the characters and enhance your friendships."

Yes! exactly.

To be honest, this is what usually has me going O.o when I run up against the "don't like the heat? get out of the kitchen" type reponses. (which are thankfully absent from this thread, although #19 is clearly flirting with it pretty hard) This is supposed to be fun, people! I'm cool with the game being hard - and even friendly teasing! - that's part of the fun, but being treated like trash by my peers is not my idea of good times...so it always kinda boggles me when people think that's an appropriate come back.

Points to SkylarkThibodeau. You don't need to worry about what gender I am, as long as I can hold up my part of the fire team and am willing to learn new skills to help. Man, woman, or tentacled critter, be polite.

@54 I agree. I have many role play characters of many genders. Some of them are straight and a few are gay men and women. They are just fun roles I play from time to time, all of them are part of me but none of them are the real me. That person is way too complicated a role to reproduce in the context of a game. In the end we just all just Human Beans.

I am a gamer and a geek. I wear the badges proudly. Some relax by fishing or golf. I relax by interacting with my fellow gamers and for a short time living out an exciting life in a seriously less mundane universe.

@Mad. I do admit that in recent times I tend to play a pacifist (since my 4 year old was in daycare one day going "Kill Kill Kill" emulating the parental unit raining down sniper fire in Blood Gulch). I do appreciate the protection of fighters of any gender, orientation, or species as I slap on healing spells or bandaids. Otherwise I have to hide from the Borg/Cylon boarding parties under the operating table in Sick bay or run screaming thru the ship.

Skylark, one of the reasons I drifted away from PvP is vigorous trash talk. I have a reasonably thick skin, but the racist, misanthropic and homophobic chat was unnecessary. Since I often find myself playing a support role, why in the world should the medic or the tank mechanic have to take badmouthing while they are trying to heal/repair your butt?

I would say that bad grooming is often a red flag for social awkardness. For some reason many people (not here, in particular, people in general) keep trying to act as though the problem is that some people don't know how to be polite - when really it's more a matter of harassers deciding to be disrespectful. So I can see why that combination has been mentioned, although I think it's more distracting and minimizing than useful.

Or perhaps the argument is that people who don't bathe, don't brush their teeth, don't use deoderant, etc are less likely to bother to uphold the social contract? In that sense I can see bad grooming being a bit of a red flag for disrespecting others. However, that runs the risk of being judgy in a way that is more about shaming people for how they look and not how they interact with others.

Dunno why someone felt the need to mention anyone's lack of slimness, however. Especially since the comment was using fat as a slur.

I find it very interesting how this whole problem - which has been an issue for years - has been coming to an internet explosion recently. Just as all these instances are being written up and discussed, I had a moment of this when I was running a LARP this past weekend. A staff member of mine, a woman, was essentially sexually harrassed at my game. I was a few feet away and dealt with the situation, but it was a glaring horrific example of someone who did not understand the base problem of dealing with women face to face and made the woman working for me so uncomfortable she had to go sit outside for a bit to recover.

On the positive side of the conversation, due to all this press coverage, the convention I was at hosted a wonderful panel regarding Women in Gaming. Where I had sat in on a similar panel at another convention years before which turned into "How do I get a hot gamer girlfriend?", this conversation was more about how to cultivate an atmosphere of support for women to feel comfortable and a zero tolerance policy for anything remotely like harrassment. It was a great dialogue that included men and women that showed this issue is being addressed. The problem, however, is very insidious, and demands constnat attention.

That is what I don't even get about misogyny...isn't hanging around cool women...cool? What is...I don't even. Okay, I do, hierarchies of oppression based on exclusion. I'm just saying, it is nice when something doofy & problematic like "how can I get a hot gamer girlfriend" can seque into "actually, by being a feminist dude who doesn't alienate women with shared interests!"

I want to find this guy and pound him into nothingness. It will do me some good to work off all of this testoterone derived protectionist instinct I have, when I see women victimized by imbecilles who would be better off locked in solitary chambers loaded with nothing but 1960s Mad Lib and 50s educational fims strung together. I am a gamer who falls into the slowly becoming healthy in his late 30s to escape the inevitable fall of mid-life crisis psychosis, as well as the heavier-ended set (at present), but is there any way we can spring for remedial social training for people?

Subscribe to this thread

Receive notification by email when a new comment is added. You must be a registered user to subscribe to threads.